According to application compatibility tools developer Changebase AOK, a staggering 87% of applications may have issues when deploying in a virtualized environment. Evidently, the source implies that the results may have to be taken with a grain of salt, but still.
Changebase AOK says it has sponsored an independent study, which used a random sample of 100 key applications working with enterprise systems – and ran those through its AOK Virtualise-IT testing suite. It found that two thirds could be virtualized but half would need some remedial work or deployment with dependent components. At least we know that’s true as far as Brain Fitness goes.
“Of the issues and information revealed by AOK, the largest group was the identification of the need for Microsoft Office availability – meaning an application wants to use an Office application, and that if this is not loaded in the Virtual environment the application will experience problems,” explains Grant Ford.
“131 informational messages were raised across 16 of the applications that could be virtualised, showing that they had a dependency on Office components being available to them – which proved interesting, as the biggest concern that clients had voiced was the ability to be able to identify dependant middleware or missing dependencies,” he adds.
[Source: Manufacturing Computer Solutions]
Changing the expression “may have issues” to “don’t work” may make for exciting headlines, but it’s not very helpful.
The main thrust of Changebase AOK’s role is to help identify migration problems, these also occur when changing MS OS version (e.g. migrating from XP to Vista) few probelms are virtualisation specific.
Paul
Thanks for taking the time to respond. You are partially right when you say that our role is to help identify migration problems to a new OS. However, it is probably more accurate to say that we do automated compatibility testing and remediation.
I agree that headlines are often less helpful when couched in a negative light. In fact if you read my study you will see that I say that two thirds of applications WILL work in a virtual environment. The study also shows that half will need some attention to get them to work properly. Many of these issues were that they had middleware dependencies (in this case one or more of the office prioducts) and others were configuration issues that needed changing. We detail these issues and provide automatic remediation for a great number. However, I would like to point out the the issues that are discussed in the paper are specific to the virtual environments and not to the OS. You are right in raising this point though, that if you want to virtualise an app it will need to be compliant with both the OS and the virtual environmental requirements.
Our goal is to try and make it as easy as possible for organisations to use this technology and gain the benefits from it. The data we provide takes the unknown out of the equation and is geared at speeding up the process and lowering the cost.
Regards
Grant